Partisanship as a Social Identity: Implications for Polarization

Political Behavior - The claim that partisanship has developed into a social identity is one of the dominant explanations for the current rising levels of affective polarization among the U.S....     

My Reverse Culture Shock: England To China and Back

Iarrived in Shanghai in late August 2017 and was greeted with humid, hot and tropical temperatures, the likes of which I had never before experienced in the UK. I was working my first day as an English teacher in a Chinese public school. Feeling dehydrated and tired, I asked a colleague in my office where I could find the water fountain.     

Trends in Australian and Canadian Public Service Perceptions from an Employee Survey Perspective

A comparative analysis of results from the 2011 Institute of Public Administration Australia and Institute of Public Administration of Canada surveys of public service leaders is mapped against related public sector employee survey tools results. Alignment of past results with current leader perceptions shows remarkable consistency across the jurisdictions over time. This overarching coherence points to two broad hypotheses: either senior public service leaders possess a common set of preoccupations in the modern global context, or a more critical perspective would question the shortcomings of the instruments given that remarkable change has occurred that one would expect should have driven result variance. Regardless of the conclusion brought to this preliminary analysis, ongoing identification and mapping of senior leader perceptions through such tools is celebrated as an important contribution to ongoing public service organizational health.     

‘Killing Ourselves is Not Subversive’: Riot Grrrl from Zine to Screen and the Commodification of Female Transgression

This article draws on material from the Riot Grrrl Collection at New York University's Fayles Library to examine the culture of ‘zine’ production in riot grrrl communities in the United States during the 1990s. After investigating the relationship between the political issues and aesthetic strategies explored by riot grrrl literary producers, the author analyses the points of tension arising within the movement, which become illuminated by zines’ revelatory confessional modes, or what Mimi Thi Nguyen has called riot grrrl's ‘aesthetics of access’. The author subsequently enquires after the implications for riot grrrl politics of understanding experiences of oppression and transgressive behaviour as cultural commodities. Finally, the author goes on to trace the commodification of the transgressive feminist gesture in mainstream popular culture and contemporary online feminist activism in the United States.